Intercad keeps community ahead at SolidWorks World 2011

Intercad's Mark Duggan, Support Team Leader and ANZ's first SolidWorks Elite Application Engineer, attended this year's event and reports back on what Intercad customers can expect in the year ahead.

SolidWorks is evolving every year, taking advantage of new technology, and improvements in global broadband infrastructure. It's critically important for us to be involved in the event, and on a personal level, it gives me the opportunity to connect with some of the global support leaders and product developers who directly assist us with technical and support services.

Putting a 'face to a name' also gives our own engineers and consultants a unique insight into how the SolidWorks organisation works, and helps us leverage the relationships we've built up over many years as Australia's leading SolidWorks partner, to the benefit of our customers.

Into the clouds  

Much of the talk over the past few months has been about sharing and collaboration, and more specifically, the ability to use SolidWorks as a platform for working on designs with multiple users around the world. This shift towards collaboration, often spoken about in the same context as cloud computing, is both exciting and intimidating for users not accustomed to sharing their designs or uploading them to the 'cloud'.

SolidWorks World showed the platform to be extremely flexible, so while it will continue to be made available for people who want to use it only on their local PCs, it has also been extended to embrace collaborative computing technology, such as the cloud. In this regard, SolidWorks World 2011 was host to some of the most exciting collaborative product enhancements we've seen, in the shape of three new product modules expected to launch later this year:  SolidWorks n!Fuze, SolidWorks Post 3D and SolidWorks Live Buildings.

I can't say too much about these products as yet as we only had the scripted demo, but I can tell you that the virtual 3D collaboration spaces and avatar-ready building environments demonstrated for us at the show were incredibly impressive. In a few short years we'll be able to 'live' our designs before the first kiln is fired or brick is turned.

SolidWorks 2012

One of the highlights of any SolidWorks world event is the sneak peek we get at the next version of the software. This year all eyes were on new features in SolidWorks 2012 such as:  the new costing feature, where the cost of manufacture is included for different parts, and are recalculated on the fly with design changes; and the motion sensor support in Simulation (along with support for motion simulation in design Studies).

There are dozens of other new features, making SolidWorks 2012 a must-have upgrade for many of our customers. Look out for updates from Intercad on release dates and training courses for SolidWorks 2012.

One more thing 

In the spirit of all major events, I've left the best for last. This year's SolidWorks World event saw Intercad strengthen its credentials as Australia's leading SolidWorks partner by claiming three awards at the annual gala dinner: Best Subscription Renewals for Asia Pacific, Top Reseller for Enterprise PDM in Asia Pacific, and (drum roll...) we've joined the 100 per cent club, being one of a few select VARs in Asia Pacific to achieve 100 per cent of our seat targets.

A big thank you goes to all of our loyal customers who every day make us their port of call for all things SolidWorks. See you at next year's event.